Wednesday, March 08, 2006

15 Park Avenue and we the normal people

With whom to sympathize? The schizophrenic girl, who honestly expresses her innermost refuge, or ourselves? We the breed of normal people , locked in our scores and unable to escape ….satisfying the sullen needs of the surrounding, but dissatisfied within, faraway from the address where we can play and win…
The film leaves us cautious! Are we really tending towards madness? The madness that knocks within us like an awaited stranger waiting to be let in. This madness assumes the other name for relief .The relief that only escape can gift. That is the solution alone. The solution to which the neo-fairytale conclusion of the film leads us. The fairytale like
‘..and they lived happily ever after..’ rings the discord as we are on our way back to the world we understand. The film tells the problem but avoids the solution, they sigh! The ending that would sound more social… the schizophrenic protagonist Mithi being cured by a godsend doctor , a dramatic climax towards the end with Mithi`s low profile lover emerging the hero by smashing all the baddies or at least a tear jerking finish … would have definitely been less frustrating for the first generation multiplex masses ! but, then the compromise would have been dear…
Where did she go? The query is indeed answered and with a poetic caress. The title is itself suggestive- she has reached her destination, 15 Park Avenue. However our skeptic minds confronts another doubt- how can she reach a place which does not exist at all ? she might be crazy enough to enter her fantasy but why are we left confused.. . she just can’t disappear ! that’s where we are fooled, unprepared to follow her yet expecting her within our reasonable framework .
We leave Mithi`s story with a certain longing . Don’t we all have a certain 15 Park Avenue? Where our obsessive dream lives in peace . Yet we can never reach the massive gates and the welcoming chores of that forbidden reality. All our longings remained locked safe from the waves of reason. We are not mad ,are we ? we cant just hallucinate and make the urchins smirk…… obsessions stay safe in their air tight closed system, why meddle at all? We are compromising with that 15 park avenue to establish our sanity . The story needn`t be stretched longer- if the urge is high lets dismiss it as ‘visions of the inward eye… bliss of solitude’ . Wordsworth wasn’t mad after all !